Art Club End-of-Year Mosaic
At last this convoluted year is coming to an end. Thank goodness! For me, it was a year of extremes, on the one hand I am thankful for the love of a dedicated, wonderful man and the incredible amount of creativity and growth I experienced both in my artwork and classes. On the other hand, I lost some people dear to me and was unable to be close to friends and family who could have helped to soften the blow.
I look back at what we did in Art Club and see 32 classes!!! That’s 6 classes more than 2019! Wow! And the year is not over yet.
I’d like to propose a fun End of Year project to Art Club members or anyone who has collected my lessons throughout this year. Let’s create a mosaic representation of what we learned through the lessons with inchies!
Create a Background
I decided I’ll have 36 inchies — 1 for each lesson plus a few extra. I created this distressed background measuring 7x7 inches (half an inch on each side). I marked 6 by 6 boxes, each one measuring 1 inch. To mark the inchie slots, I used a stencil created by Jenny Perruzzi’s Acadia Laser shop, but you can easily mark it with a ruler.
Notice how I left spaces between the inchies, just a little breathing room.
One inchie = 1 lesson or concept
The idea is to reflect on each lesson — there are 34 so far and the year is not over — and create a 1x1 inch (2.5 cm) square miniature. Small works of art measuring 1x1 inch are usually called Inchies.
You can punch out or cut the inchie from an unfinished picture, or you can recreate the concept you learned in the lesson on a scrap piece of paper and cut it out:
I plan to create 3 inchies per day and figured that we could take December and January to work on the entire project.
To help you plan, here are the lessons we learned during this year:
What if I didn’t complete all the lessons?
I know what you’re thinking, you probably didn’t attend every single one of the live classes or watched all the videos. And if you just recently joined Art Club or purchased individual lessons, you may not even have all these lessons in your account. And besides, we have 36 slots, and there were 32 lessons, what’s with that!
Remember the idea is to EVALUATE WHAT YOU LEARNED. So if you felt that one particular class was more valuable and you learned a LOT, you might want to make more than one inchie for that lesson. If you missed a class or never got it, then skip that one.
The mosaic is a picture of what YOU learned.
Why should I participate in this project?
It’s important to evaluate your trajectory and body of work during an entire year
It can give you a real, palpable sense of what you learned this last year
It can stop “comparanoia” (comparing yourself too much to others)
It can help to summarize in one single piece the work that you’re doing
It will be a super fun project to work on December and January, without taking too much of your time
It will make for a pretty neat piece to hang on your wall!
If you participate in this project, use hashtag #artclubeoymosaic when posting online.
If real knotted, woven tangles give you a headache, then you can always try some “faux” knotwork. This fun, intermediate video class is now back and available to the public.